As has been reported everywhere this morning, Mozilla has renamed Firebird. The new Firefox trademark is the result of a naming conflict with another open source project, and the process has been written up by those involved: Ben Goodger, Steven Garrity, and Jon Hicks.

As might be presumed from my earlier work with the Mozilla Foundation, I was privvy to the conversations that took place during the brainstorming. When it became apparent that Firefox was the candidate of choice, I noted my personal opinion. I didn’t like it. It just didn’t sound right. It’s not a browser, it’s a fighter jet or an 80’s hair band. It’s too easy to mistake the second syllable for a vulgarity when pronounced. It’s abrupt, and the alliteration doesn’t work. All the way up until this morning I still thought it was a poor choice.

But that was before I saw Jon Hicks’ brilliant logo, and the new pinstripe theme for OS X, and realized that as a brand, Firefox is actually going to work. This is one example where the sum is much greater than the individual parts. Though Hicks’ logo stands alone as an excellent piece of illustration, the browser context is needed to give it meaning. Though the pinstripe theme is great, it needs the logo to give it character. Though the browser is top-notch, it needs the branding to give it a public face that so far it has been lacking.

Safari now has some real competition and thanks to the new installer, using Internet Explorer on Windows is no longer a justifiable decision. Hats off, way off, to all involved in this effort. I can’t wait for the servers to unclog so I can grab my copy.

Ray Henry has noticed that Firefox has stopped rendering the :hover state of everyone’s favourite accessible CSS tabs. By paging through FastCompany’s tabs, I’ve found that if you leave the mouse over a menu item on page load, it may load in the :hover state but then stick like that, without allowing actual hovering. This is in both OS X and Windows 2000, by the way. Anyone know why this is? Comments are open.

And further on Firefox growing pains, Dunstan Orchard has noted a problem with Firebird extensions spawning XBL errors. He’s got an easy fix, so if any of this sounds familiar, it’s worth a quick look.

The SimpleBits page works for me using a 24th January trunk build of Mozilla Firebird. Given that the Firefox 0.8 branch was cut in about December, this is probably a short term regression that has been fixed since then.

Oh and I think the new name sucks :-) IIt doesn’t tell someone encountering the product for the first time what it does; they have no idea if Firefox is an ISP, a search bar, a piece of spyware or a new type of herbal viagra. It’s also far too masculine and aggresive for my liking. I’m sure that I’ll get used to it soon enough though.

I read somewhere on MozillaZine or Mozilla.org somewhere recently that the “birds” will no longer be replacements for the Application Suite. Fire(bird|fox), Thunderbird, and Mozilla Suite will all continue development.

According to the Firefox roadmap, 1.0 should be here by springtime (well, spring in the northern hemisphere at least). According to the things I read from the Firefox pages, “Firebird” was the PROJECT CODENAME for a product that did not yet have a PRODUCT NAME. That product was to replace the application suite, and take it’s name – being “Mozilla”. “Firefox” is the PRODUCT NAME for the project formerly known by the PROJECT NAME of “Firebird”.

“Firebird” was always intended to be a temporary codename. They had every intention of changing it sooner rather than later. I’m just curious if they’re going to change the name of Thunderbird at all…

The overflow:hidden property in nested divs causes the right padding to double. This is true for Firefox and Mozilla 1.6. I think it’s a problem with all 2004 Gecko builds. It almost drove me insane this morning when I got rendering problems in my site after upgrading the browser formerly known as Firebird.

And as yours truly first reported on the flashcoders list, the browser will incorrectly position flash movies that are set to scale 100% and align to the left top of the browser window if the salign attribute does not precede the scale attribute in the flash movie’s embed tag.

The correct order should be:

salign=”LT” scale=”noscale”

However, if it appears as:

scale=”noscale” salign=”LT”

which is the default order when published from flashmx, it will not be rendered correctly in this browser or Mozilla 1.6

I was wondering aobut the name change…personally, I liked the Firebird name…it matched up well with the companion mail app Thunderbird….but stylo is definitely correct in that the Mozilla folks could definitely use some branding/marketing help.

The xbl errors people are experiencing…is this happening because they didn’t follow the installation instructions? (disabling all extensions in Firebird prior to installing Firefox). Or are there extensions that are being added that are actually creating the errors?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox slated to become the Mozilla Browser when it hits 1.0? I recall hearing that somewhere and I also heard that Thunderbird will become Mozilla Mail when everything is said and done.

The illustration skills displayed in the logo are excellent and I like the style quite a bit, however, I find it a little weird that the main subject of the logo is looking directly away from the viewer. I know when people critique my logowork, I cringe frequently, but I think this is a valid criticism. I would expect more of a profile view of the fox or a 3/4 view peering forward from behind the globe.

Are a result of the fact that a directory name changed from ‘widgets’ to ‘bindings’ then back to ‘widgets’ again (or maybe the other way around. I /think/ they broke Seamonkey compatibility for no obvious reason and then realised they needed to be compatible again so that the DOM Inspector would work. But don’t quote me on that). This means that extensions which use XBL and were designed for an older version of firebird are looking for a directory that doesn’t exist anymore. One problem is that the error handling needs to be improved; if there is a problem loading an extension rather than part of the main browser, it should bail loading that extension, disable the extension, and report the problem, rather than refusing to load the browser.

>>I liked the Firebird name…it matched up well with the companion mail app Thunderbird

But who would figure out or recall from the names which did what? Fire surfing, thunder email?

What was possibly wrong with Mozilla Mail, Mozilla Browser, all from the Mozilla organization? One word/brand to learn: “Mozilla.” (Then straighten out the whole apps vs. suite mess and you’re done.) For good fun read this post:

I like Firebird better. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just because the Back/Next buttons are missing from Firefox. It also has problem with scrollbars on my Windows XP. They are totally absent. I don’t know why. They show up just fine in Firebird. The icon’s nice, and so is the name. But I’ll switch back to Firebird. :(

Use the default theme. Most themes haven’t been updated for the new version yet.

> Back/Next buttons are missing from Firefox

Which buttons? Back / Forward (from the default install) or Next/Previous (from the link toolbar extension). If the former, it’s a theme issue, the latter is an extension issue; try reinstalling the extensions.

Funny, this post is EXACTLY what I was thinking while downloading Firefox yesterday. I’m still not crazy about the name, but the logo is really top-notch. Unlike previous logos, this one communicates ‘web browser’ to me immediately.

I do wish someone would put some serious marketing behind Mozilla, but there is sadly no profit potential. At this point I’m just thankful for a good browser existing at all…

Gabe said: “I do wish someone would put some serious marketing behind Mozilla, but there is sadly no profit potential. At this point I’m just thankful for a good browser existing at all…”

I agree. At this point, though, the best marketing we can do is word of mouth. One by one I’m getting co-workers to make the switch. Every time someone comes by my desk for something, I make sure they see me working away in my browser…opening links in a new tab, etc. I slowly chip away until finally getting them to *try* a new browser. I have yet to lose a convert…It’s the first step that’s the hardest.

A lot of people are saying it doesn’t matter what the browser’s called, they’ll still use it.

I had only just downloaded Firebird 0.7 when a couple of days later, Firefox 0.8 got released! It downloaded slowly, but somehow I was able to get it straight away.

I had no problems installing it - my customised toolbar of icons was just like it was before, along with my bookmarks. Odd because it was installed into a different directory!

Has the DOM Inspector always been included? I noticed it was if you choose “Custom” when installing. See my website for my thoughts on this versus the Mozilla version.

The logo does indeed rock. Hopefully the name won’t change again, so when version 1.0 comes out, we can start promoting this browser en masse. (It’s not advised to do so yet, as it’s still a “Technology Preview”, with features half-working or not at all.) Shame - to me it seems already superior to IE6.